In Which Friends Don't Let Friends Sit Up Late Doing Their Theses In The Lounge-room All By Themselves

You may or may not know, Dear Reader (dear Increasingly Hypothetical Reader: now I remember why I enabled those pesky Anonymous Comments in the first place, this lack of feedback is strangely disconcerting, and feels rather like I’m doing that thing where you continue talking to someone who thought you’d finished and has left the room. You know, you’re all “... and that’s why I never eat potato crisps” and you look up for emphasis only to realise that your flatmate is in the bathroom and you’ve been explaining things to your sofa for the last minute and a half. Which is always odd, because it’s somehow much more embarrassing than something which is by definition unwitnessed has any right to be. Anyway, my point is that the lack of comments is vaguely disconcerting, which is hypocritical, since I rarely if ever make the effort to comment on other people’s blogs. Where was I? This is why I shouldn’t blog late at night. Oh yes...) as you may or may not know, Dear Reader, there is still no proper internet at my house. My Fortunate Flatmate Georgia has one of those internet-on-a-stick things, but it seems not to work in my computer, and is pretty slow. The upshot of this is that these ramblings have to be uploaded by USB. Unfortunately, my USB is for some reason unrecognisable to the library computers and also always causes the Georgia-Web to crash, somehow. This being the case, and given that it’s insane to not have a properly functional not-mysteriously-cursed USB in this day and age, I recently bought a bright shiny new one. Which has now completely disappeared.

How does this happen? I know that the disappearance of socks and biros and suchlike is an oft-bewailed mystery, but seriously, what? Where can my USB be? Where is that blue top that I’ve been unable to find for a month and a half? What, in fact, is going on here?

Being as how there’s essentially no hope for a satisfactory solution to this mystery, I suppose we’ll have to settle instead for a slightly eclectic collection of recent occurrences. (Also, did you know that the word “occurrence” is from the Latin “Occurro” meaning to “run up to”? You can figure this out anyway really, that “curro” would mean “run” since “current” is pretty obviously derived from it, I’d reckon. This is sort of satisfying as an image, I think; that occurrences which happen about one are like a guy running up to you on the street and pantingly handing you a message, as if one were a general on the battlefield, or similar. You stand there curiously thumbing open an envelope and out eagerly withdraw a page which reads “You happen to suddenly bump in to an old friend, and go for a cup of coffee, which is lovely, and you wonder how you lost touch” or something, and you think “oh neat, I was wondering how to spend this afternoon.”)

Whoa, not only discursions on “recent occurrences” but also “very long slightly insane tangents in parentheses” and “subclauses lengthier than the overarching sentence from which they depend” apparently. Sorry guys. In my defence, it’s after midnight, and I’m really only up and typing rather than peacefully abed because I’m being moral support. Georgia Who Will Have Honours Really Soon For Sure has her thesis due in about 36 hours, so I’m making a productive and encouraging tapping-and-typing sort of noise while we rock out to Tears For Fears on our laptops in the lounge room. That’s how we roll these last couple of weeks, although naturally we vary the musical selection. Soon, we will watch TV and read books and relax like normal people. In the meanwhile, blog posts are non-compulsory reading but compulsory writing.

This is probably for the best, anyway. The last post I wrote was so lame that I didn’t even bother uploading it (think about the things you’ve read on this blog: if they made the cut and something else didn’t, it must’ve been really pretty seriously lame, and it was), and it’s surely good to get back on the horse, so to speak, in these instances.

It’s been a fairly pleasant 24 hours, really, so I’ve no right to sound so... well, cracked is the only word, isn’t it? On Friday night, I went to the birthday party of Kaveh From My PBL (not everyone’s title is exciting: sometimes you just need a practical descriptor, and this is not a person who needs any more nicknames. I’m aware of at least 4 that he already has, and we’ve only been at uni together for one semester so far). This was delightful event somewhat in the vein of the Red Party, not in the sense that it was a massive charitable event at which awareness was raised and prophylactics distributed, but in that it was at a Venue, not a mere “place” per se, and that you had to lean in towards people to talk because of the efforts of a DJ. Also, the people were again the Med 1 In-Crowd, which I seem to have somehow accidentally sort-of-infiltrated the edge of (one always secretly suspects that people in these cases will suddenly realise and throw you out, like people in a 90s movie set in a High School [why do I keep talking about Teen Movies this month? So odd, I swear they’re not usually this big a part of my lexicon. Only recently, somehow] or something, but this is obviously stupid. Real social groups are permeable, and in real life it’s possible to be a cool attractive popular person who knows who Llando Calrisian is without having to live some kind of lie. I assume. I make no claim to be the former, and I’m not actually sure I’m spelling that name right, so perhaps this is irrelevant to me anyway. I suppose that in this sort of setting, everyone’s likely to be a bit of square, really, aren’t they? I mean, like, deep down, under the body paint? Never mind.)

The party really was nice, I’m not being sarcastic when I say it was delightful; I chatted to several excessively lovely people from my various classes, and their equally pleasant plus-ones where appropriate, as well as chatting to people whose classes I’ve been in for a mere 6 months, and who therefore were perfectly within their rights to make it clear that they didn’t know me from a bar of soap.

In short, being as how such a saccharine time was had by all, there is very little of interest to actually say about the people who were actually part of the event itself, nor about the event, which was, as I believe I’ve noted, nice, except to maybe note as usual that it is an as-yet-unrealised dream to one day learn to mingle at these damn things. It’s so difficult to talk to more than one person at once that when you know fewer than about two thirds of the attendees, you inevitably spend a bunch of time just quietly people-watching (also a lot of fun, let’s face it) and waiting for the conversation to flow back your way. This seems to be something a lot of people manage effortlessly, but we can’t all have these sorts of Socialite Super Powers; some of us are our own Mild Mannered Alter Egos, basically.

The people who just happened to be at the same pub (are you allowed to call places like The Loft “pubs”?) however, were intermittently more remarkable to the uncharitably-minded. One gentleman in particular distinguished himself in this regard. Having danced himself up to where I and some equally unsuspecting girls where standing, he draped an arm across me and exhorted me to dance on the grounds that he was more worthy of our sashaying and company than the guys on our other side because they were Indian. (First note: leaving aside for a second the breathtakingly racist subtext and indeed text of this remark, I’m pretty sure they weren’t all Indian anyway. I know that at least one is Colombian, for a start. My point here is: being brown doesn’t make you Indian, and even being Indian doesn’t make you “Indian” in a stereotyped sense. And being any of these thing doesn’t make you less worth dancing with, holy crap).

At this point this Unspeakable attempted to entertain us with an impression of how it would be to talk to these acquaintances and classmates of ours; “Would you like a curry?” His attempt at an Indian accent would not have been out of place in The Footy Show or something. Or so I imagine, I’ve never actually watched a whole episode, to be honest; I’m not even sure what flavour of football it is that they enjoy. Not soccer, I guess, and this is as close to Football as I really get.

Then he singled out the guy in our class (to whom I’ve never actually been introduced, so his name is a mystery to me, but I see him every day, so I definitely recognise him as having more right to any potential friend-loyalty than some random in a pub, let alone a weirdly inappropriate racist one) and laughed at him for having a turban and a beard. Pretty sure that that hasn’t been acceptable since well before I was born. I went to junior school in Penrith, so if anyone was going to be aware of the things bogans think is acceptable humour, it’s me, and not even 5 year old westies in the late 1980s thought it was cool to point and laugh because someone wore a turban or headscarf. This classmate, I was earnestly assured, would rather offer me a pappadum than dance.

At this point I removed the arm (successful at last, having been attempting since about the 2nd sentence he’d said) and enquired whether the race-themed pickup lines ever worked, and explained that if they ever were, that time was not now. I would’ve pointed out to him the error of his ways at some officious length, but it was too loud to do that without leaning in close to him, and that’s clearly a trap. (Maybe this was, in fact, his plan, who can say?)

The thing is, he seemed genuinely surprised. Why would this be? Could this sort have thing have ever worked? Surely not; he wasn’t that old, surely at no point in his entire adult life has that sort of thing been cool. Sure, the dude was probably massively drunk, but even that wouldn’t make most people think that the way to get chicks is to racially stereotype the people they hang out with. Do you think that this has maybe worked for him in the past? Or is it like a Sasha Baron Cohen movie: all it takes is a couple of drinks and the thin veneer of reasonable-person-ness comes off people, exposing the horrifying unacceptable core, like an M&M dropped into a glass of solvent?

Aaargh. There is no way that wondering about this can help, at this time of night, but I sure hope that that was some random in the pub, not someone from our actual class, because it would probably confuse him I went up to him some day and told him off, since he probably doesn’t remember, and also because I pretty much despair if this is the sort of dude whom the interview process doesn’t cull. Also, I don’t need to accidentally sound like I’m backstabbing someone in from uni on my blog, not again. In this case I’d much rather front-stab anyway.

In happier news, I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie today! It was pretty awesome, although as usual I got to the end grateful to have read the books, since the exposition left a little to be desired. A poignant closing shot of a phoenix (not in flames) is ever so much more poignant when it’s been introduced earlier in the movie. Even having seen the others and read all the books all those times, I still went “what’s with the redhead eagle?” for a second or two. Also, I can’t believe it took me until today to twig that the phoenix is named Fawkes for the purpose of awesomeness. Guy Fawkes you guy! Omg, duh. Think of all the times I’ve read that and not gone “fantastic naming, go team!”; so many wasted opportunities. Still: plan to make up for lost time now, and also totally plan to reread the last book, since I can’t really remember what happens in it anymore, which is great, since I know I enjoyed it last time, so this is a chance to enjoy the book properly all over again. I guess when I read it I was in the throes of that global Potter Fever Pandemic that struck the geeks of the world all at once, so I was probably too excited to pay attention properly.

Funny, really, those events were somehow sort of meta-great. Queuing to buy a book is a whole bunch more fun when you’re doing it with an enormous number of people who share your interests, even if you don’t know them. And the fact that all of the geeks of your particular enthusiastic flavour and fandom all over the world are doing the exact same thing adds a really lovely air of community to it, somehow. Maybe this is how we ought to look at Swine Flu? Not as an insidious world-wide killer but more as some kind of feverishly sniffly harbinger of global togetherness? How touching.